Beschreibung:

Here we are thrilled to have been appointed to offer this remarkably interesting example of what enthusiasts have repeatedly voted as being ‘The World’s Greatest Sports Car’ – the flat-12 cylinder, air-cooled Porsche 917. Over three tumultuous seasons of World Championship endurance racing, Porsche of Germany’s initially 4.5 and later 4.9 and 5.0-liter 917s fought a no-holds-barred battle with Fiat-Ferrari and their Italian 5-liter V12 Ferrari 512s. The Porsches proved dominant, and their 917K Coupes played the major role in securing for the Stuttgart marque a hat-trick of World Championship titles during 1969-71. The Porsche 917 is plainly too well known and understood to require a detailed introduction here. Suffice to say that it is the iconic Porsche model which gave this legendary marque its first overall race victories in the Le Mans 24-Hours and that despite the design’s present age of over 40 years 917 performance will still – as one past World Champion driver put it “…still take the crease out of your trousers”. Consider, for example, a 0-62 mph (100 km/h) time of 2.3 seconds, 0–124 mph (200 km/h) coming up in 5.3 seconds, and a top speed – when properly configured - of over 240 mph (390 km/h). And yet combine all of this with notable driveability, tractability and controllability and the immense esteem in which the 917 is held becomes completely understandable. Broadly speaking, after the original 1969 prototype cars had been developed to true competitive raceworthiness, Porsche produced six variants of the 917. The first to shine with its cut-back rear deck and short tail was the 917 Kurz (short) – popularly known as the ‘917K’ in which guise the chassis now offered here first appeared at Le Mans 1970. An aerodynamic, long-tailed variant was known as the 917 Langheck (long-tail, or ‘917LH’). The 917/20 was a one-off low-drag study for Le Mans which was famously painted pink and decorated as a diagram of a German butcher’s cuts of pork, accordingly being nicknamed ‘The Pink Pig’. For the 1972 Can-Am series of unlimited-capacity sports car races the turbocharged open Spyder-bodied 917/10 had been developed – in conjunction with Penske Racing – and for 1973 the ultimate Spyder-bodied, twin-turbocharged Porsche 917/30 developed over 1,100 bhp (820 kW), or as much as 1,580 bhp (1,180 kW) in qualifying tune…becoming arguably the most potent road racing machine ever constructed. Examples of the 917/10 Turbo Spyder were also supplied to client teams interested in contesting the European InterSerie Championship – which was Europe’s contemporary counterpart of Can-Am competition. At least two former endurance racing 917K Coupes were also cut down with ultra-lightweight Spyder bodywork fitted and naturally-aspirated flat-12 engines retained instead of being turbocharged. This particular car offered here – 1970 chassis serial ‘026’ – was one of these cars, and it is offered here in contemporary InterSerie racing configuration, as campaigned there by the German owner-driver Ernst Kraus, and subsequently by Georg Loos’ Gelo Racing Team for well-known Porsche exponent Jurgen Barth. But to trace the history of ‘026’ as now offered here we must first consider its debut as one of the three 1970 Le Mans 24-Hour race entries of the now-legendary Gulf-JW Automotive racing team. The car had been assembled for its race debut and was painstakingly prepared by Gulf-JW in defense of the team’s two consecutive previous victories in the 24-Hour Grand Prix d’Endurance at Le Mans. Those two victories had been achieved with the same Ford GT40 liveried in matching pale-blue-and-orange Gulf Oil-sponsored colors. For its debut at the Le Mans 24-Hours, on the weekend of June 13/14, 1970, Porsche 917K ‘026’ wore a distinctively different version of the Gulf livery, with its entire cabin roof being sprayed orange down to the waistline, instead of carrying the color merely as a centerline stripe as on its sister cars. It carried race number ‘22’. Chosen